Pocket Hole Tips / Pocket Hole Jig Tricks

hello everyone i'm colin kannette today i'm going to show you some of the tricks that i use when using pocket holes well i found out the hard way that going cheap on screws it's not always a good investment these two are good quality screws this coated one is for outdoor um this chrome one is for indoor and many years ago i purchased inexpensive screws and you know what happened three or four times the heads snapped off before i finally threw them out and anytime you have to dig out the shaft out of a piece of wood you'll realize that investing in quality screws is actually a good investment one of the things that works very well for me is the convenience of using my pocket hole jig and i have mine on a little platform with a piece of wood underneath i just put it in my workbench and it sits flat against my bench and a couple of cranks and it's all ready to go when i don't use it i can take it out and put it in the cupboard and for me it's very convenient because most of the things that i do with my pocket hole are smaller pieces now when i do have a longer piece you can't really see but this area here there's no way of supporting so what i have to do is sort of build something up to support it a little bit further on down the bench here but let me show you what gerald just sent me so gerald has made this frame and i haven't attached mine so mine's a little bit of a mock-up but that's what it looks like with two pieces of wood on each side so he takes his pocket hole jig and puts it in the pocket and now that it's on his bench and these extensions of course line up with the face plate of his jig so that when he's using longer pieces he's already got support for it and it doesn't matter which side it is you can go on either side the only thing you'll if you make something like this and it's a great idea you'll need to make sure that it's this the the wood is the same height as your pocket hole jig whatever jig you're using in my case it's not but this is just a mock-up to show you how this works because i thought this was a really good idea so thanks gerald i appreciate the information on that now what you're looking at here right now is three quarter inch plywood and three quarter inch mdf now you'll notice that the plywood is not fully three quarters of an inch that's not a mistake all plywood that's sold as three quarters of an inch is always less than three quarters of an inch that is how the plywood association have set their guidelines for plywood widths mdf on the other hand is a full three quarters of an inch now the reason i'm telling you that is because if you're using plywood you may need to readjust your setting any of the better quality jigs you'll be able to do some adjustments depending on the thickness of wood that you're using and in this case this little part moves up and down here and you can see that they actually have numbers printed on the side so for example if you are using if you've purchased what has been sold to you as three-quarter inch plywood and you measure it and you find that it's not three quarters of an inch you're probably going to want to reset your pocket hole jig and probably 5 8 would be a better setting for that so you just reset that and you're ready to go if you've been working with pocket holes something like this has probably happened to you and when we turn it around you can see that it's not aligned this area here is high and it's just it's misaligned and and it's not right these are very difficult to fix i'm going to show you how but here's why that happens if you don't clamp this and you try and hold it with your hand in some cases as you're driving the screw in what happens that screw will find its own path and once it hits this wood here sometimes it will follow the path of least resistance and what that and what happens is it will it will jog itself up exactly like that and it will misalign because it's following the grain in the other piece of wood and the only way to avoid that is to make sure that you clamp every joint but here's how the only really the only way of fixing that the only way to fix that you can a couple of things to do what i like to do is to fill those either with epoxy a little like a toothpick or something that will fit in there with a little bit of epoxy or a little bit of ca glue sand that off so so that there's no bump there because the bump of the wood can also affect how your joint sits and let it sit uh if use five minute epoxy let it sit for five minutes till it's hard and then redo it and this time make sure that you clamp it so clamping with pocket holes is almost a must in every case and one of the things that i purchased when i bought my pocket hole jig was this clamp and you can see it looks brand new and that's because i hardly ever use it because as far as i'm concerned it's pretty useless and if your wood is exactly the same width if it's all cut off the same board you can actually use this and clamp the two pieces and for that it works okay but you know now if this thing is sort of sitting in the air um and and you need to try and align it somewhere so that's not a great idea the other problem is what happens when you want to go like this you can't there is no way of clamping that and even if your wood is a different thickness and that happens from time to time i don't know if you can see that but there's about a sixteenth of an inch difference there and again you can't use a clamp like this here's another thing that you can do something that i made up quick and simple so what i made out i have this assembly frame that i've made up and this is basically 90 a perfect 90 degree angle i use this for all sorts of things if you look closely you'll see that there's a filler underneath here see the hole underneath there and the reason for that is so that i don't if i get a little bit of sawdust on there it doesn't matter i don't have to keep clearing the sawdust it just goes underneath so when i'm doing for example if i'm doing pocket hole assembly i just put that on there and it always aligns perfectly to the edges and as well i've got these clamps that i put on here and i i can take them on or leave them on or take them off and i you have to make little slots in there so that they go on they just fit fit in there and slide into place and then i can snug them down with my screwdriver so that if i want to take them off later on i can do that but now like my assembly is quick and easy i can clamp that down and now i have a perfect alignment and all of my wood is flat because whenever you're doing pocket holes you always want one surface or i shouldn't say always but very often you want one surface that's always going to be a flat surface and the other side usually doesn't matter so even if you're working with different thicknesses of woods you're still going to get that flat surface there and like many things in woodworking there are exceptions and the exception in this case is if you are gluing boards together you can use pocket holes and it's actually a pretty good system and the way it works is in this case you put your holes in the short side in in not in the long grain but in the cross grain because now you're going to be gluing those boards together and typically you put those holes every six inches or so and make sure your boards are straight and flat and now is a good time that you may be able to use this kind of a clamp because usually when you're gluing boards together they're going to be the same thickness or very close to the same thickness so you can go along and drive your screws in and you may need to move your clamp along each time so it might be a little bit more tedious but you know what if you've got long or sorry thick boards or wide boards and or you don't have clamps it's a great system but what's even more sometimes you're gluing boards in a situation like this so you're not gluing boards and edge to edge you're needing to glue them like this and again this is a good way of doing that you can actually clamp that and drive those pocket holes in that way now whatever you do whenever you're gluing boards together in whatever configuration when you're finished you're always going to want to take those screws out and that's a good thing because you can reuse those screws so you'll save a little bit of money but the big thing is if you're ever taking this to your table saw or a miter saw you want to make sure that you're never going to strike those screws in there because that's going to ruin your blade so that's the other reason and the pocket holes or the screws in there after it's been glued they're not serving any purpose anyway the glue is far stronger than the pocket hole screws that were holding it well that concludes my video for today just some of the little tips and tricks that i use whenever i'm using my pocket hole jake and maybe there's something there that will be helpful to you i'm colin kanet for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 585,710

Rating: 4.864481 out of 5

Keywords: pocket holes, pocket hole, pocket hole joinery, pocket hole jig, kreg pocket hole jig, pocket screws, pocket jig, pocket jig 200, kreg jig, kreg jig mini, kreg k5, kreg jig projects, kreg jig k5, kreg r3, kreg jig hd, kreg mini, kreg k4, kreg pocket hole, pocket hole screws, how to make a pocket hole jig, woodworking joints, jointery, joinery, woodworking joinery, wood joinery

Id: uy5UhJpKDKE

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019